


The Haunting of Simon Jordan

by fairwinds09



Category: Alias Grace (TV)
Genre: Civil War era, F/M, healthy dose of irony, slow onset of madness, victorian ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 13:23:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13295778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairwinds09/pseuds/fairwinds09
Summary: He goes to war to escape her. Simon Jordan no longer claims to know much of anything, not anymore, but he does know this: Grace will be the end of him.[A Civil War ghost story.]





	The Haunting of Simon Jordan

**Author's Note:**

> I binge-watched _Alias Grace_ in a single day over my Christmas break - mostly because I started watching one morning and simply could not make myself stop. It's addictive in all the best ways. Based on a Margaret Atwood novel, for starters, and then the unreliable narrator, the all-too-timely commentary on the deleterious effects of women's harassment and abuse, the narrow focus on a woman's voice (literally)...I loved it all. 
> 
> Which is why, when I started writing this story, I found myself dismayed and alarmed to discover that apparently my muse wanted to write the whole thing from Simon Jordan's perspective. Not only that, but she also wanted to make him thoroughly sorry for himself because Grace was haunting him and wouldn't leave him be, even on a battlefield. I nearly gave the whole thing up until I realised that this would work if viewed through a perspective of deep sarcasm for the good doctor's very lachrymose self-regard. I still wish my muse had wanted to write a searingly beautiful slash fic featuring Mary and Grace living out their days happily in a log cabin deep in the wilds of Canada, but such was not to be.
> 
> This is...an odd story. I wanted to end up with something that demonstrated how thoroughly thoughts of Grace consume Simon, even after he runs off to the Civil War to escape her. I also wanted to explore Simon's guilt: guilt for leaving Grace in her miserable situation without lifting a finger to help, guilt for desiring her even when she very well could have committed the crime of which she is accused, and guilt for still wanting her, even on a battlefield. Finally, I wanted to give the reader a sense of how much Simon indulges in self-pity, despite the fact that his situation is infinitely preferable to Grace's (or indeed most women's). 
> 
> This is an unusual sort of work for me, so I beg of you to have patience with it, although constructive criticism will be welcomed as always. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy!

He goes to war to escape her. 

In his saner moments, when he’s actually managed to get a few hours of decent sleep, he finds it bitterly ironic. Depending on whose story you believe, Grace Marks drove McDermott to murder and the gallows, drove Kinnear to betrayal of his mistress, drove Kenneth Mackenzie to a breach of professional ethics…and now she’s driving him to war. He doesn’t know what is true about her, not anymore, but he does know this: Grace will be the end of him. 

It works, at least for the first month or so. He doesn’t see her floating behind his eyelids when he lies down to go to sleep, doesn’t hear her soft voice singing into the quiet. There is no quiet here on the front lines, not with the roar of rifle and artillery and the screams and moans of the dying men. His branch of medicine is of no use here, not when the doctor’s craft is reduced to hacking off mangled limbs before they putrefy and trying to stave off outbreaks of cholera and diphtheria. He contents himself with doing his duty, numbly follows the directions of his superiors, falls asleep sitting straight up because the exhaustion overwhelms him so terribly he cannot find the strength to lie down. There’s nothing else for him, no phantom lurking at the edges of his consciousness. It’s a blessed relief. 

Then, one freezing night in Tennessee, he sees her. He’s left his tent to seek out a mug of coffee, hoping to warm himself on this bitter evening. The February winds are not quite so bone-chilling as they are in the north, but they still manage to cut through him with sharp, stinging blades. As he looks up, he realizes that there are tiny flakes of snow swirling through the air, billows and eddies limned sharply against the firelight and the night sky. He stares up for a few moments, entranced by their unpredictable ballet. 

It’s when he looks down again, towards the fire, that he sees the unmistakable flash of red hair. At first he thinks it’s a stray flame, leaping out away from the others, but then he sees the slim, dark figure and he knows,  _ knows _ , who it is. She’s facing away from him, but as he draws closer, feet crunching over the frozen ground, she begins to slowly turn. His heart hammers wildly in his chest and his stomach clenches with mingled dread and anticipation. His fingers reach out for her against his will. 

“Grace?” he whispers, so softly that it’s lost in the crackle of the flames and the whirl of the snow-laden wind. She’s facing him now, a smile barely curving her lips, and he can’t breathe. 

“Grace, you’re here,” he murmurs, and her lips curve a little more, as if she’s almost laughing at him. Her mouth moves as if she’s saying something, but he can’t hear it. Desperate, he walks closer, reaches out, half-hoping and half-fearing that his hands will touch cloth and solid flesh. 

There’s a sudden pop and a bright flash of flame from the fire as a piece of wood breaks off and sparks fly up, and in the flare of light she’s gone, melted away as though she were never there in the first place. He stumbles, falls to one knee on the rutted ground, pats wildly in the mud where she was standing, but there’s nothing there, not so much as a single footprint. He pulls back his hand, stares at his muddy fingers, and closes his eyes. It’s beginning to happen again, the madness, and it seems he can do nothing to stop it. 

He stays there for a long while, on his knees in the cold, until finally he manages to force himself to get up and shamble slowly back to his tent. It’s the cold and the exhaustion, he tells himself. He’s seeing things because he’s tired and it’s been a hellishly long week on the offensive against Fort Henry, not because he’s mad and trying to reach out to a hallucination of a convicted murderess. That cannot be the answer. He will not let it be the answer. 

All of which is very well, until he’s almost back to his tent, brushing back the flap to enter, in fact, and he feels the sensation of warm breath against his ear. He starts violently, just as soft lips brush his ear. He can feel a small hand on his sleeve, the warmth of a much smaller body very close to his. Then he hears it, in that unmistakable Irish lilt that he can’t drown out even after months spent in a world of screaming death. 

“Hello, doctor,” she whispers, and then the world goes dark and spinning around him and he knows no more.

 

* * *

The camp doctors tell him when he wakes up that he was dead to the world for a day and a half, probably the combined effects of exhaustion and overwork, not to the mention the prolonged strain of battle on the nervous system. He accepts their explanations without question, merely asks when he will be ready to go back again. They let him go within the week. 

He fights and eats and sleeps like an automaton now, barely speaks to or looks at anyone for fear that her wide-eyed blue gaze will be looking back at him out of someone else’s eyes. 

He is haunted, and the worst of it is that he can’t decide whether he hates it or longs for more. 

 

* * *

It is most likely the combination of decreased appetite and insufficient sleep that makes him more vulnerable to the typhoid that is raging through the camp, he thinks. He knows what is happening—he is a medical man, after all. The throbbing headache, the trembling and weakness in all his limbs, the aching throughout his body, the dry, hacking cough…all of it leads to the easiest and simplest diagnosis. He has contracted typhoid, for which there is no known cure, and if the current odds are any indication, it will most likely kill him. 

He can’t find it within himself to care. 

 

* * *

They find him balled up in his blankets, shivering uncontrollably, and take him to the makeshift hospital in the camp. The burning in his head is terrible, like a fire that has taken up residence in his brain. He begs them for water, and they oblige, but his thirst is not quenched. Distantly, he can hear his own moans and thinks that perhaps his death is coming faster than he thinks. 

The hospital reeks with the stench of the dead and the dying, a horrible miasma of vomit and bodily fluids, of rotting flesh and the coppery tang of fresh blood. He turns his face into the scratchy edge of the blanket with which they covered him and hopes that it will be over soon. 

At some point—he’s not exactly sure when—he feels a small, callused hand grip his own, the thumb gently rubbing over his joints, soothing him. He doesn’t open his eyes. Undoubtedly it’s a nurse, some angel of mercy who’s been brave enough to serve in an Army hospital. But if he keeps his eyes closed, the illusion doesn’t have to go away. 

“Are you ill, doctor?” a voice whispers, and his fingers tighten around the small hand so much that its owner gasps. He relaxes his grip slightly and feels tears of relief prick the backs of his eyes. He had hardly dared hope…

But the hand slips away from his, and he groans in misery. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows that he’s hallucinating, that this is part of the disease. Just for a moment, though, he wanted to pretend it is real, just for the barest moment. Then he feels the little fingers with their roughened pads brushing back the sweat-stained hair from his forehead, and he sobs with relief. 

“Grace?” he croaks, the words hardly sounding human forced through his dry and aching throat. “Don’t leave me, Grace.”

“You’ve a terrible fever, doctor,” she says calmly, in the same quiet tone she reserved for telling him about the atrocities visited on her in the asylum and the horror of seeing her best friend dead in a pool of her own blood. He shifts his head, seeking out more of her touch. 

“Will you—will you stay with me, Grace?” he pleads, and he hears her breath drawn in and out, the sound so soothing he thinks he could listen to it for hours. 

“Only for a short while, doctor,” she murmurs, and he reaches out blindly for her, catches a fold of her dress between his fingers. He still does not dare to open his eyes. 

“I beg of you not to leave me here, Grace,” he manages through cracked lips, and he swears he can feel her smile. 

“I shall not be gone for long,” she promises, and for now it is enough. 

 

* * *

He loses all sense of time and space for a long while, and when he awakes again, it is night. He is cold down to the marrow of his bones, cold and trembling from head to toe with it. The tent is dark, with only the faint glow of oil-lamps dotting the blackness here and there. Slowly, he becomes aware that there is another body lying next to his, so close that he can feel it rise and fall with every breath. Hope flares sharply in his chest, so high and fast he can hardly bear it. He dare not turn and look, for fear that it is simply another patient who has rolled too close in his own delirium. 

“Grace?” he whispers into the cold dark, and against all thought a small hand comes to rest on his sleeve. He rolls over, expecting to see nothing but empty air, and then what little breath is in his body is knocked fully out of him. She is there, in the flesh, lying on his pallet, her white nightdress a stark contrast to her flaming hair. Unbelieving, he reaches out with shaking fingers, runs his thumb along the perfect line of her cheekbone, the curve of her jaw. 

“You  _ are _ here,” he murmurs, and she smiles a little. 

“What did you think, doctor?” she says, and he smiles back. “Although this is not so fine a place as when we last met.”

He nods and rubs finger and thumb along the rich strands of her hair. 

“I did not think you would come again,” he says softly, reaching out a hand to brush along her arm, her shoulder, his fingers circling the delicate wrist. He’s done this once before, years ago, when he dreamt of her in his bed and woke to discover he was lying with his landlady instead. Some dimly rational corner of his mind takes comfort in the fact that there is no landlady to be mistaken for Grace here. 

Her slim fingers, still roughened from years of hard work, skim over his face, and his chest tightens with the tenderness of it. 

“Why have you come to me, Grace?” he asks, although he’s a little afraid of the answer. She says nothing, and he decides to risk a bold step. Slowly, as if not to alarm her, he slides his hand around her waist and pulls her closer to him. She does not resist. 

“Is this—” he breaks off, swallowing hard in his nervousness. “Is this—a liberty, Grace?”

She stares up at him, unblinking, and he is snared like a bird in the thrall of her sky-blue gaze. 

“I do not mind it, doctor,” she says very quietly, and he breathes out in a sigh of relief, sliding his hand up and down her thin back. She is still so very beautiful, and so small against him, and he wonders yet again what her mouth would feel like slanting down over his. 

“I would not take liberties with you, Grace,” he murmurs, and presses his lips to her hairline, breathes her in. Her skin is as soft as he remembers, as soft as it was when he brushed his fingers against it after she fainted. He remembers then that the slide of her silken hair across his hand was like the searing pain of an open flame. 

She lays her head quietly in the crook of his shoulder, and everything within him is overcome with the sweetness of it. 

“It would make no difference if you did, doctor,” she observes after a long pause, and it takes his fever-addled brain a few moments to make the connection. 

“Of course it would,” he argues, although he is currently too weak to lift his head, and therefore the protest has little of the vehemence with which he wishes to convey it. 

She smiles, a somewhat sly grin that makes him uneasy. 

“You dreamed of taking liberties before, did you not?” she asks, and he looks away, ashamed. “You dreamed of me in my night-dress, kissing you, doing aught else with you. I know it.”

“How?” he manages through the choking embarrassment. “How do you know this, Grace?”

She shrugs a little and props herself up on her elbow, looking down into his face. 

“I know all of it, doctor.”

He closes his eyes, too tired and weak and sick to ponder what this might mean. He is dazed by the fever, dreaming things that cannot possibly be real, but it is Grace, here, with him, and he dare not question too closely for fear she will vanish once again. 

“Sleep, doctor,” he hears her whisper, and he feels the brush of her lips across his forehead like a benediction. “Sleep.”

Unable to help himself, he obeys. 

When he wakes, there is a long, silky strand of red hair lying across his pillow.

 

* * *

The fever reaches its height the day they take Fort Henry, and it is an awful thing in his delirium to hear the screams of the men and, worse yet, the screams of horses as they are ripped apart by bullets and shells. He has seen his fair share of suffering by now, had fancied himself strong enough to bear it, but the scream of a wounded horse is still one of the sounds he fears most in this world.

As afternoon toils on into evening and the battle rages, they bring more and more wounded in with gaping wounds, their shattered limbs and protruding stumps of bone peeking through tattered flesh. Their screams beat in on him, the din becoming senseless one moment and horribly clear the next. Somewhere in the maelstrom he slips away, until he is standing in the hallway of an asylum, before a plain wooden door. There is a little window in it, barred over, and shut from the outside. Slowly, fearfully, he slides it open. 

She looks out at him from within the room, eyes wide and dilated with fear. Her hair is wild, not neatly pinned beneath a cap as when he knew her, and there is a smudge, or a bruise, on the side of her face, marring the porcelain skin. He sucks in a sharp breath when he sees her so. 

“Grace?” he whispers, reaching out through the bars for her. He feels her thin fingers close over his, and the touch brings him a little peace. 

“Help me,” she begs, and there is such pain and terror in her face that he would give anything to alleviate it. “Please, help me.”

“I shall,” he murmurs. “I swear it. I shall get you out of this place, Grace.” 

Her face smoothes out a little, the lines of anguish less taut, and he brushes his fingers over hers in an effort to comfort her. 

“I shall not abandon you here, Grace,” he promises, trying to smile at her reassuringly. “I shall take you from here as soon as I can.”

No sooner has he said it than there are footsteps behind him, and several burly men in the white uniforms of attendants stand behind him. 

“You’ll ’ave to move, doctor,” one of them says in coarse tones as he takes a set of keys from his belt and unlocks the door. “Time for ’er  _ treatment _ .”

The other laugh roughly, and something sick and cold slips into the pit of his stomach. Grace’s hold on his fingers has released, and he looks for her in vain. As the attendant slides the door open he sees her, huddled in a corner of the room, arms wrapped around her knees like a small child. She is shaking violently, he realizes, and he begins to rush to her, to carry her out of this hellhole. 

“Afraid you can’t do that,” one of the attendants says coolly, and two of the others grasp his arms, holding him fast. He twists fiercely in their grip, but their hands clasp him like iron bands. 

“I am her doctor!” he spits at them, and finally succeeds in jerking one arm out of their grasp. “I have every right to be here. You are not to harm her, do you understand me? You are not to—”

“—take any liberties?” the man sneers unpleasantly, and the sick feeling in his stomach spreads. “Don’t you worry, doctor, Miss Marks is a  _ very _ obliging young lady, now, isn’t she? Most agreeable to all manner of  _ treatments _ , I should say.” 

The laughter makes him mad now, mad with dread and fury. 

“You are not to touch her!” he cries vehemently, but he is roughly thrust back against the wall and by the time he regains his balance, the men have entered her cell and bolted the door behind them. He hears a sneering voice say, “Now,  _ Miss _ Marks, what ’ave we here?” and then a thin, tremulous whimper of terror. His blood turns to ice in his veins. 

“Let me in!” he cries, pounding at the door with his fists. “Do not harm her, or I shall see every man of you hang, damn your eyes! Let me in!”

The whimper has escalated now to a full-blown cry, and then he hears her voice, cracking and twisting with mindless panic. 

“No, no, don’t….oh, God, no, no… _ no! _ ” she cries, and the last word is little more than a scream, long and shrill, sliding like a blade beneath his skin. He freezes on the other side of the door, unable to believe this is happening. 

“Grace!” he bellows, and if he had ever doubted that he wanted to protect her from the horrors of the world, he knows it now. He can imagine the things going on the other side of that door, the humiliation and debasement to which she is being subjected, and the very thought of it makes a red haze hover before his eyes. He is a medical man, a civilized man, a man of science, but at this moment he wants nothing more than to break and destroy and tear to pieces every single one of those men until they are nothing but bloody piles of wasted flesh. 

“Grace!” he shouts again, and from the other side of the door he can hear her screaming, strangely muffled. He does not want to think why. “Grace! I am coming, Grace!”

He hears a heavy thud, a sharp cry, and then she sobs out, “Doctor…doctor! No… _ please _ , no. Doctor…” And then there is another thud, and then silence. 

That is the last straw. He attacks the door, battering it with hands and feet, slamming his body up against it again and again, insensible to the pain. It withstands his every attack, and then to his horror he feels hands grasping his arms and legs, drawing him forcefully away and pinning him to the ground. 

“Don’t struggle so!” he hears a sharp voice cry out over his head, and then another barks, “Morphine—bring him morphine, quickly.” None of it matters, though, for Grace is on the other side of the door, enduring God knows what horrors at the hands of those animals, and he can do nothing. He struggles ineffectually against the hands pinning him down until he feels the rim of a bottle at his lips. 

“No, no,” he mutters, thrashing weakly, “no, I must get to her—get to Grace—”

“You can see your sweetheart by and by,” a voice says soothingly over his ear, “but first you must take this, lest you do yourself an injury.” 

Strong fingers pinch his nose, and when he opens his mouth to gasp for air, a bitter liquid trickles down his throat. He gasps and coughs, but within moments the effects of the drug make themselves known, and his ceaseless writhing stops, his limbs weighted down with a manufactured heaviness. 

“Grace,” he murmurs, his throat aching and sore, but he can see nothing now. Everything has gone black and still, and Grace is gone. He could not get to her, and now it is too late. Weakly, he turns his head to the side and searches with his hand for her, hoping that perhaps she is lying beside him again. His fingers meet nothing but the worn folds of his blanket. 

“Grace,” he whispers again, and the tears sting the back of his throat as he succumbs to the darkness. “Grace.”

 

* * *

He falls deep into the blackness, so far that he thinks he has fallen into the centre of the earth and will remain trapped there forever, in the great vast silence. A long, long while later, he begins to hear a sound, very faint and far away at first, but becoming clearer and more distinct as the moments pass. 

“ _ Rock of ages, cleft for me _ ,” the voice sings, and he knows it, that sweet, lilting soprano. Relief floods through him. He has found her, at long last. 

“ _ Let me hide myself in thee _ ,” the voice continues, and suddenly there is warmth and light upon his face. He opens his eyes, and all around him is green and white and fragrant, the sunlight beating down upon him in great golden waves. He peers around, and realizes he is in the middle of a meadow, rich with high green grass and waves of white wildflowers. In the midst of them she is walking, swaying slightly just like the blades of grass as they bend in the breeze, and she is singing. On her hair is a crown of wildflowers. 

He stands, surprised to find that he is hale and hearty and able to walk again. As he moves toward her, he marvels at how pretty she is in her light frock, so different from the plain prison dress in which he always saw her. He slips behind her and pulls her into his arms as he always did in his dreams, and, just as she did then, she sighs and lays her head against his shoulder, perfectly content against him.

“Grace,” he murmurs in her ear, bending his cheek towards her beautiful hair. The wildflowers tickle his skin, and their fragrance is intoxicating. 

“Doctor,” she replies softly, and he smiles. 

“Grace, do you not think you can call me by my given name, now?”

She ponders for a moment, and her small hands come to rest over his where they encircle her waist. 

“I do not know that it would be proper, doctor,” she says gravely, and he smiles again. So solemn and formal, his Grace. 

“And why not?” he counters, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head. She smells of soap and wildflowers and sunshine, and it sends his heart to racing. 

“Because I do not think I know you well enough for that, doctor,” she replies, and he releases her, only to turn her about and lift her chin, very gently. 

“I should like for you to know me well enough for that, Grace,” he says softly, and her eyes lower so that he can see her long lashes brushing her cheeks. “I should like for you to…to care for me enough to call me by my given name.”

She looks up at him again, her eyes wide and blue and fathomless, and he is lost in them, as surely as he was lost the first time he met her gaze. He reaches for her hands and brushes her knuckles with both thumbs. 

“You’ve no ring and no parson,” she observes, but he does not flinch. 

“I shall give you anything you want, Grace, if only you will do this for me,” he promises, and he sees her flush a little. “Please, Grace, give me only this concession, and I shall ask for no more.”

She looks down again, considering, and when she looks up, he knows he has won her. 

“Very well,” she says softly. “Mary said I should have a man whose name began with J. Mary was always right, you know, doctor.”

He smiles, undone with the force of his joy. 

“Not doctor,” he says, brushing his lips over her brow. “Say my name, Grace.”

She stills, biting her lip, but he is very patient, and his waiting is well-rewarded. 

“Simon,” she whispers, and a spear of victory shoots through him, white-hot and searing. 

“Ah, Grace,” he murmurs, crushing her in his arms and kissing her fiercely. “Say it again, I beg you.”

“Simon,” she whispers in his ear, and he thinks he very well may explode at the sound of his given name on her lips. He has been with women carnally before, in various situations, but he thinks that never before has he so desired a woman simply from the sound of his name on her lips. 

He kisses her again, savouring the softness of her cheeks and eyelids and the secret little hollow behind her ear, hoarding each gasp and sigh as if they were priceless gems. Her hands, those delicate little hands, hold fast round his neck as if he is her only anchor, and he cannot imagine a moment of greater happiness than this. 

Suddenly, though, she gasps too loudly for it to be a sound of pleasure, and her hands break their hold round his neck. Stunned, he watches as she doubles over, a moan of pain spilling from her lips. 

“Grace?” he asks, still breathless from kissing her and utterly bemused by what is happening. “Grace, tell me, what is wrong?”

“Ohh,” she moans low in her throat, clutching at her stomach. “I knew—I knew I should not. I knew it would happen. I have sinned, I have sinned, and this is my punishment. I had to be punished, like Lot’s wife.”

She whimpers, and her face drains of all colour. He reaches for her, trying to find out what is hurting her so, but she twists away from his touch. 

“No, no, you cannot! I have sinned enough—there is blood on my hands. Such blood…”

She lifts her hands and holds them out to him, palms up. He is shocked beyond measure to see that they are wet and glistening with fresh blood. 

“There’s no saving me,” she whispers, and then clenches her teeth as another moan tears through her. “No saving either of us.”

“What do you mean, Grace?” he asks wildly, and only then does he see the red stain, spreading like a flower across the front of her dress. The horror of it seeps through his brain slowly, writhes in his stomach like a pit of snakes. 

“No,” he gasps, and she looks up at him through tears. 

“It happened to Mary, my Mary, and now it will happen to me too,” she says in a tiny, heartbroken voice. “Tis the curse of Eve, doctor.”

“No…no!” he exclaims. “You are not hurt. No one has performed such a procedure on you. You shall not die, Grace. You have not sinned, not like this.”

She ignores him, and he sees a line of silver snake down her cheek. 

“Grace!” he cries, but she begins to sway on her feet, her face bone-white and stark with fear, and then she begins to crumple. He reaches out for her to break her fall, and he finds that he can’t move. Slowly, so slowly, she slides to the ground, and he cannot move a muscle.

“No…Grace…” he whispers, but the red stain is growing deeper and bigger, and she is so still, so still. After a moment that lasts forever, her eyes flutter open and stare at him, the pupils dilated so that the irises are just the thinnest ring of blue. 

“Doctor,” she says, so faintly he can barely hear her, and he sees her take a labored breath. “Save me, please, doctor.”

“Oh, Grace.” He reaches for her desperately, tries as hard as he can to move his feet, but nothing will work. “Grace, you must not give up. Please, Grace.”

She closes her eyes and her tightly-balled hands relax, spreading open so that he can see the blood that has seeped into all the crevices of her skin. 

“Simon,” she whispers, and then her breath stops. 

(The smell of wildflowers nauseates him now.)

 

* * *

He awakes at last. He does not know how many days it has been, how much time has passed in this charnel house of a hospital. He does not want to know. He knows he dreamed, a combination of the delirium and the morphine they gave him to keep him from thrashing about in that delirium. He knows the dreams were about Grace, that they were by turns exhilarating and horrifying. He knows that she could not possibly have been here, yet he saw her and touched her and heard her here, in this place, before the delirium dreams started. 

He knows he is slowly going mad. 

They send him to Campbell General Hospital in Washington, in order to facilitate a more rapid recovery. They do not tell him directly, but he knows that they despaired of his life. He knows too that his fever and delirium were such as would have killed another man. He does not think, as he might have once, that he was spared by the merciful hand of an Almighty Providence, nor does he pretend that he is simply the recipient of good fortune at the hands of fate. The truth of the matter, as he now understands it, is much, much simpler than that. 

Grace is not ready to take him just yet. 

 

* * *

The hospital is much calmer and cleaner than the rough tent in which he suffered days and nights of fevered delirium (although as a medical man and a proponent of the latest techniques he finds its efforts at sanitation often sorely lacking). He lives on a tense precipice of anticipation and dread, waiting to see her again. It does not happen for nearly a week. 

He is asleep one night in his narrow bed, the purl of the stream of water running through the nearby basin and the click of the nurses’ shoes lulling him to rest. He awakes suddenly, sharply, at the feeling of hair brushing against his face. When he opens his eyes, it’s her, almost exactly as she was in his dream at the boarding house, down to the embroidery on her nightgown and the unearthly gleam of her eyes. 

“Grace,” he whispers, mindful that the neighbouring beds are close and he will be noticed talking to what seems to others to be thin air. She looks down at him gravely, without smiling, and her thin fingers smoothe a fold of the sheet repetitively. 

“You have not come to see me for a long while, doctor,” she murmurs, and she stills when he reaches for her hand. He refuses to be put off, however, and wraps his fingers around hers. She feels strangely cool. 

“I would have seen you sooner than this, Grace,” he whispers, petting her fingers fondly. “I cannot see you at will, it seems.”

She is sitting curled next to him, close to his hip, and he decides to take an enormous risk. Carefully, he curls his free hand around her waist, marvelling at how tiny she is, and raises his eyes fearfully to hers, wondering if he will see anger or distaste there. She glances down at his hand, and then looks at him with such wounded sorrow in her eyes that he feels the guilt down to his bones. 

“Grace, don’t look at me so,” he murmurs, removing the offending hand and touching her cheek lightly. “I did not mean to offend you, not for the world. I beg of you, do not be angry with me. I did not mean it to offend you, I swear it.”

She stares at him as if he has struck her a mortal blow. 

“You did not come for me,” she says. “You did not help me, doctor. Would you have me go back to the asylum, then, or rot in prison the rest of my days?”

He flinches at the mention of the asylum. He only remembers fragments of his delirium-dreams, but even the fragments of his dream of her at the asylum are enough to make him shudder, incomplete as they are. 

“I do not wish either of those things,” he chokes out, running his fingers through her hair. “I would rescue you, Grace, keep you safe and loved. You know this.”

“You do nothing to make it so,” she says with some heat, and he is shocked at it. In all the time he’s know her, all the time she’s haunted him, she has remained the same soft-voiced, sweet girl he met over a year ago. 

“I will do it, Grace,” he murmurs. If he’s being honest, he reached his breaking point in regards to her long, long ago.  “I swear I will do it, when I am well and able to go home again.”

“You did not write the letter.”

He lowers his eyes, ashamed. 

“You thought I was guilty, didn’t you, doctor? That the story of Mary haunting me was a lie, that Jeremiah helped me lie to you before God and everybody?”

He cannot deny it. That day shook his faith in everything, but most of all in who Grace Marks herself was. He wanted to know if she was guilty or innocent, certainly, but more than anything he wanted to know that the sweet-faced slip of a woman he’d fallen so hopelessly in love with was not capable of the brutality of which she was accused. He would’ve accepted any plausible story she would have told him, anything from James McDermott forcing her to do it to a fugue state to self-defense. Anything but the horrible coarseness that came pouring out of her mouth in a dead girl’s voice, with the light of Hell gleaming in her eyes. 

“You were right, doctor.”

At the words, his body seizes in shock. He did not know what he expected to hear from her apparition’s mouth, but this was assuredly not it. 

“Why, Grace?” he pleads. “Why? Why not tell the truth to us that day? To me?”

“I wanted to see you sit there and listen to it,” she says quietly, her fingers shifting away from his to pleat the bedsheet in tidy folds. “You, who had listened to my story from first to last, who knew how I had suffered and been made to fear, you only wanted what they all wanted.”

“No, Grace,” he whispers, and feels the bite of guilt all the same. 

“You wanted me on my back in your bed, just as you wanted your landlady on her back on the floor. A shameful deed to be done in the darkness and forgotten in the light. Ladies like Miss Lydia are for the light, aren’t they, doctor?”

“No,” he whispers, for though it may have been true or at least partially true a year ago, a year of madness will do wonders to change a man’s mind. He does not know whether to term it obsession or insanity, but to think of another woman besides Grace Marks now strains his capacity to reason. She is everything for him, his every waking thought, his every dream in the throes of sleep or nightmare. There is nothing else for him but her, not anymore. 

“You deny it, doctor?” she challenges, and he captures her two roughened little hands, holds them fast to his heart so she can feel the blood thumping through it. 

“I do deny it now, Grace,” he murmurs to her, raises her hands to his mouth to kiss them reverently before returning them to his chest. “I might have once, shamefully, thought of you so. But even then, Grace, even then, I wished to protect you and care for you. To keep you from dishonour. You must believe me, Grace, that you were not a plaything for me, nor a mere curiosity. I cared for you from the start, Grace, the more so as I came to know you. Your beauty, your sweetness, your terrible plight…Grace, who could not come to love you, knowing you thus?”

She stares at him, her brow furrowing in bemusement. 

“You speak of love, doctor? To me?”

He nods, too inflamed by passion to be prudent. 

“I do speak of it, Grace, for you know it to be true. How else would you explain that I have thought of nothing but you these long months, that I have longed for you to be with me even in the midst of this terrible carnage? I swore to forget you, Grace, and it seems that I cannot. My will is weak against you, as it ever was.”

Without a word, she takes her hands from beneath his, stares at them long and soberly. Then she takes his face in her hands, leans down, and kisses him, long and slow and burning. By the time she moves away, he cannot think of anything save the feel of her in his arms, loving and his at last. 

“Ah, Grace!” he exclaims as she draws away, and he can feel the joy crinkling his eyes and beaming from his smile. She does not return it, though, and she sits back, staring once again at her hands. 

“You do not believe these are a murderess’s hands, then?” she asks slowly, and he feels as though his blood has turned gelid in his veins. “The hands of a woman who would strangle Nancy Montgomery in cold blood, and kill her unborn child as well? The hands of a woman who would murder and watch her lover murder and say nothing in reproach? These same hands you held to your heart, to your lips, doctor, are they the hands of a murderess?”

He cannot answer, the fear and uncertainty locking his throat, and the silence stretches too long. She rises, looking down at him with something unearthly gleaming from her eyes. 

“This is why I told you Mary’s story, doctor,” she says quietly, rubbing her hands together as if to wash them of…something. “You thought you already had the truth, that I must be guilty, filled with anger and revenge and a cold blackness of the soul to murder. You thought my hands were coated with Nancy’s blood. And worse, you knew in your heart of hearts wanted to lie with a convicted murderess, wanted those bloodstained hands to caress you and fondle you and comfort you in the dark watches of the night. Why not tell you what you had decided you already knew?”

He is frozen to the bed, unable to move even if he wanted to, and the rising sense of claustrophobia wells up in him. 

“Grace…” he pleads, but it is to no avail. 

“You will not see me again, doctor,” she says softly, coldly. “Not until the time. You have left me to languish, and I shall not see you more.”

“Grace, please, do not leave me, I beg of you,” he babbles, unashamed of his naked pleading. She shakes her head, though, impassive as a justice on his bench. “Grace, I beg of you! Do not leave me. Tell me the truth of that day, and I swear I shall listen. I swear I shall write the letter to exonerate you, tomorrow, tonight even! I shall do it while you watch. Only do not leave me alone, for I shall surely go mad without you.”

She laughs, a high cold sound that skitters like fingers of bone down his spine, and the smile curving her lips is a heinous thing to see. 

“How fitting, doctor, that you should go mad for love of a madwoman, a woman who was tied down to a chair in an asylum and made the sport and plaything of any man who cared to put his hand up her skirt. How fitting that poor Grace Marks should drive one more man to the brink, poor haunted, possessed, mad Grace Marks. How fitting, doctor, that a murderer’s whore should come to drive a celebrated physician quite, quite mad. It is so very fitting, you see.”

He screws his eyes shut in anguish, reaching out for in desperation. 

“Grace,  _ please _ ,” he moans in an agony of horror, “please, do not speak so. You are none of those things, and I swear I shall prove it to the world. I shall tell them all that you are a woman of virtue and honour who has been sorely wronged and mistreated. Only do not leave me, Grace, I beg of you. I shall come for you, I swear it. I shall come for you as soon as I can leave this bed. Grace!”

She looks down at him for a long, long moment, and in her eyes he suddenly sees the same Hell-light he saw under the black pall when the spirit of Mary Whitney possessed her. She reaches out, and he feels her cold, callused fingers close around his throat. 

“You mistake me, doctor,” she hisses, and her face has changed so from the sweet countenance he knows that he would hardly recognize it. It is a cold, blank void empty of any expression at all that stares back at him with soulless, stark blue eyes. “It is not you who shall come for me, but I that shall come for you. And when I do, dear doctor, you will find it best to let me in.”

“ _ Grace _ ,” he chokes out around the punishing grasp that has locked around his windpipe, and she loosens her fingers as if burned. “Grace, I do not…I cannot understand…”

“Be watching for me, doctor,” she says, a smile not quite of this world slanting across her features, and then she is gone, vanished into the half-light of the hospital dormitory, and he is left gasping and choking and filled with horror alone on his narrow bed. 

The next morning, when he dares to examine his throat in the shaving-mirror the nurse brings him, he finds five purpling spots dotting his throat. They are small and perfectly spaced, about the size of a petite woman’s hand. 

He is sent back to the line two weeks later. 

 

* * *

He fights like a man possessed, like a berserker of the days of the old myths, and against all odds he gains a reputation amongst the men of his unit for being utterly fearless, willing to laugh even in the face of death. He chuckles to himself at night, thinking how little they know how he longs for death, how desperately he wishes for a stray bullet, for the thrust of a bayonet to take him. Then, and only then, will he see her one last time. 

It comes on the last day of August, hot and steamy, the humidity rising off the ground in waves. He wakes that morning with a strange alertness, his senses overly sharpened as if he has been honed to a fine edge. They are attacking the legendary “Stonewall” Jackson’s regiment again today, the regiment that in the space of little more than a year has become the stuff of Union men’s nightmares and Confederates’ glory. As he puts on his uniform, slides the brass buttons closed and fixes his bayonet, he feels an odd prickle up the back of his neck, and suddenly, inexplicably, he knows. 

Today is the day. 

The fighting is brutal, wave upon bloody wave of men thrown against the Confederate line again and again, and again and again repulsed. His boots are ankle-deep in a welter of blood and flesh and spatters of men’s brains. More than once he steps on a fallen body, and more than once it is so mangled, so covered in blood and muck that he cannot tell whether it is friend or foe. It hardly matters at this point, he realizes finally. He is doomed to become one with them anyway. 

She comes when the battle is at its pitch, the bullets whizzing past him, the screams of dying men and the roar of the artillery at fever height. He bayonets a charging Reb, feels the odd give of the blade pushing through layers of cloth and the first layers of the dermis and then sliding through flesh like butter until it lodges in bone. The Reb, a boy who cannot be more than nineteen years of age, gurgles and gasps and falls in a crumpled heap, and then is silent and still. (Like Grace had been, in his dream. He looks away and turns to find the next Reb, the next kill. Something else to look at.)

Then, and only then, does he see her, as if the mere thought of her had been enough to summon her to his side. She stands there, perfectly still, in the midst of utter carnage, and he could swear that there is a glow around her that has nothing to do with the late afternoon sun and the haze of dust that floats over the battlefield. Her hair is loose and curling around her face, her frock is of light, flowered muslin, and her hands are open, spread towards him in a gesture of welcome. The horrible hellish light that was in her eyes the last time he saw her is gone, replaced by a delight that he has never seen on her face before. She smiles at him, wide and full, and he remembers all over again why men have killed and died for the sake of lovely little Grace Marks. 

“Simon,” she calls to him, and it is as if the noise of battle disappears, fades away into a dull, muted hum, and the only thing he can hear clearly is her voice. “Simon.”

He barely manages to keep his feet, his knees have gone so weak beneath him. 

“Grace. Dear God.  _ Grace _ .”

She walks towards him, over the maimed bodies of the injured and dying, but there is not a stain on her pretty little boots, nor on the lace hem of her gown. When she reaches him, he succumbs to the shock, falls to his knees before her, head bowed in submission. 

“Simon,” she whispers, and he feels her fingers in his hair, lifting his face to hers. “Ah...my dear doctor.” 

She strokes his cheek, and he turns blindly into her touch. Gently, so very gently, she bends down and presses a kiss to his forehead like a prayer, a benediction. 

“Grace, please,” he croaks out, too overwhelmed to question the wonder of her presence here with him. “Please do not depart from me again. Let me be with you, please, Grace.”

Her smile is so lovely, he thinks it will break his heart. 

“I shall, doctor,” she promises, and he gazes up at her with all the hope he has left within him. “Come and hold me for only a moment, and I shall stay with you always.”

He rises shakily from his knees, his hands still caught within hers, and once on his feet, he draws her to him. She comes easily, willingly, and the feel of her tiny frame against him, the perfection of her, makes his head swim. He presses his face to her hair, breathes in soap and sunlight, and the dirt and miasma of the battlefield fade away. 

“Are you ready, doctor?” she whispers, and then she kisses him, such a kiss as would stop the world from spinning on its axis, a kiss that obliterates all time and space. 

“I am ready, Grace,” he replies when he can find his wits again, and she raises her hands to his face, framing his features as she gazes up at him. 

“Close your eyes, then, doctor,” she murmurs, and he does. 

Her voice in his ear sounds clear and sweet as the tones of a bell. 

“ _ Let me in. _ ” 

The explosion. The ringing, and then silence. The rending pain, which is blessedly short before the darkness descends. 

But, in the darkness, there is Grace.

 

* * *

Ten years pass in his prison of flesh. He knows little, cares little, cannot move or speak or remember hardly anything. He does not care, for she is there. She speaks to him, brushes back his hair and holds his hand and sings little scraps of hymns, and it is enough. He will die in a year or two or three, and that will be enough too. 

His mother comes in one day, tears in her eyes and lips trembling, and reads him a letter. She says it is from Grace. It speaks of her pardon and release from prison, her marriage to a man she does not love, her search for contentment in a quiet, peaceful life far from the turmoil of her past. He neither knows nor cares if it is true, for he knows where she truly is. She has been here, with him, all this time, and what cares he if some lesser version of her lives on a farm with Jamie Walsh and raises Leghorns and sews quilts? The true Grace,  _ his _ Grace, is here with him, and she will remain so always. 

He lifts his eyes to her as the letter concludes, and she laughs silently as if this is a most amusing thing. He would smile back at her if he could, but as it is, he contents himself with knowing that she understands. She always understands. 

He looks at her, the way the light shines on her hair, as red as the day he met her, on the lovely unlined skin of her porcelain face, the timelessness of her, and he closes his eyes for a moment, the better to burn the picture of her upon his brain. When he opens them, she gazes down at him sweetly, brushes her thin fingers across his lips. Suddenly, without warning, he feels his paralyzed tongue loosen, and he blinks as it comes to life again. He has but a moment, he knows, and he thinks carefully what he shall say with this unexpected gift. Then, he  _ knows _ what he has to say. 

He opens his mouth, draws in a harsh breath in preparation. What other word could he possibly say, with her smiling down at him and her hand resting so lovingly in his? What other word could possibly explain how she has haunted him from the moment he first saw her in that dank prison cell, how she will haunt him throughout eternity? There is none other. 

He closes his eyes once, then opens them and stares at her fixedly. 

“Grace,” he says. 


End file.
